Immigrants make America stronger and richer

Modern nations can’t – practically or politically – have open borders, which allow anyone who chooses to immigrate.

The good news is that America doesn’t have open borders, and there is no significant faction in our politics saying we should. In fact, immigrating to the United States legally is fairly difficult.

The bad news is that we’re having a hard time enforcing the rules on immigration, mainly because the relevant government agencies don’t have sufficient resources. And right now, the reason they don’t have those resources is that many Republicans in Congress, while fulminating about a border crisis, appear determined to deny the needed funding.

Their position is rooted in extraordinary political cynicism, and they aren’t even trying to hide it: Donald Trump has intervened with Republicans to block any immigration deal because he believes that chaos at the border will help his election prospects.

While blatant sabotage explains the current immigration impasse, however, there’s something else lurking behind it: Trump and those around him are profoundly hostile to immigration in general.

Partly this is xenophobia, if not outright racism. If you repeatedly declare, as Trump has, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” you don’t really care if they came here legally, you’re all but saying that what matters is whether they’re white.

But it’s not just that. People close to Trump have a zero-sum view of the economy, in which every job taken by someone born outside the United States is a job taken away from someone born here.